Partnering Strategies For The Urban Edge

The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (RBA) is a national award for urban places that promotes innovative thinking about the built environment. Established in 1987, the award celebrates urban places distinguished by quality design-design that considers social, economical, and environmental issues in addition to form.

Urban riverbanks are attractive locations and highly prized recreational environments. However, they must meet the requirements of flood control, open space design and ecology at the same time, often a challenging task for the designer. This book is the product of extensive research that identified some 60 best-practice examples and subjected them to a comparative analysis. The result is a systematic catalog of effective strategies and innovative design tools that provides readers with an inspiring overview of the broad spectrum of design possibilities for river spaces. Each project is illustrated with photographs taken especially for the book and each design strategy and tool is explained by diagrams. This revised edition introduces ten new case studies chiefly from North America.

Some cities have long-treasured waterfront promenades, many cities have recently built ones, and others have plans to create them as opportunities arise. Beyond connecting people with urban water bodies, waterfront promenades offer many social and ecological benefits. They are places for social gathering, for physical activity, for relief from the stresses of urban life, and where the unique transition from water to land eco-systems can be nurtured and celebrated. The best are inclusive places, welcoming and accessible to diverse users. This book explores urban waterfront promenades worldwide. It presents 38 promenade case studies—as varied as Vancouver’s extensive network that has been built over the last century, the classic promenades in Rio de Janeiro, the promenades in Stockholm’s recently built Hammarby Sjöstad eco-district, and the Ma On Shan promenade in the Hong Kong New Territories—analyzing their physical form, social use, the circumstances under which they were built, the public policies that brought them into being, and the threats from sea level rise and the responses that have been made. Based on wide research, Urban Waterfront Promenades examines the possibilities for these public spaces and offers design and planning approaches useful for professionals, community decision-makers, and scholars. Extensive plans, cross sections, and photographs permit visual comparison.

Vancouver is heralded around the world as a model for sustainable development. In Planning on the Edge, nationally and internationally renowned planning scholars, activists, and Indigenous leaders assess whether this reputation is warranted. While recognizing the many successes of the “Vancouverism” model, the contributors acknowledge that the forces of globalization and speculative property development have increased social inequality and housing insecurity since the 1980s in the city and the region. By evaluating policies at the local, provincial, and federal levels and taking reconciliation with Indigenous peoples into account, Planning on the Edge highlights the kinds of policies and practices needed to reorient Vancouver’s development trajectory along a more environmentally sound and equitable path.

This book provides approachable and insightful chapters that summarize state-of-the-art thinking and research on alliances and networks. Contributions by leading scholars cover foundations or fundamentals as well as frontier areas through a diverse range of perspectives.

How can we make it easier for schools and families to work together on behalf of all students? It all begins by tapping into the different strengths educators and parents and caregivers can contribute to building a strong partnership. Partnering with Parents to Ask the Right Questions, by Luz Santana, Dan Rothstein, and Agnes Bain of the Right Question Institute, presents a deceptively simple strategy for how educators can build effective partnerships with parents—especially those who typically have not been actively involved in their children's schooling. It distills complex, important ideas on effective civic participation into an easy-to-learn process that teaches parents two fundamental skills they can use to support the education of their children, monitor their progress, and advocate for them: asking better questions and participating effectively in key decisions. Based on more than two decades of work and research in a wide range of low- and moderate-income communities, this book empowers overburdened and under-resourced educators and parents to work together and achieve their common goal of successful students. This indispensable guide includes case studies spanning K–12 classrooms, and it explores ways to assist struggling students, collaborate on IEPs, and communicate with families of English language learners. The accessible and easy-to-use format, field-tested advice, and vivid examples from schools that put the advice into practice make this a must-have for everyone from the classroom to the central office.

With the recent advancements and implementations of technology within the global community, various regions of the world have begun to transform. The idea of smart transportation and mobility is a specific field that has been implemented among countless areas around the world that are focused on intelligent and efficient environments. Despite its strong influence and potential, sustainable mobility still faces multiple demographic and environmental challenges. New perspectives, improvements, and solutions are needed in order to successfully apply efficient and sustainable transportation within populated environments. Implications of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in Urban and Rural Environments: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on recent transportation improvements and the development of mobility systems in populated regions. While highlighting topics such as human-machine interaction, alternative vehicles, and sustainable development, this publication explores competitive solutions for transport efficiency as well as its impact on citizens’ quality of life. This book is ideally designed for researchers, environmentalists, civil engineers, architects, policymakers, strategists, academicians, and students seeking current research on mobility advancements in urban and rural areas across the globe.